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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (84618)	6/28/1999 8:22:00 PM
From: philipah	Respond to of 186894

Tenchusatsu and THREAD - The Motley Fool weighs in on the Coppermine delay Here's the link fool.com P

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (84618)	6/28/1999 8:56:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Ten - Re: "How well will this transition work? Hard to say, since supporting both IA-32 and IA-64 is dependent on the OS. We all know just how SUPERB a job Microsoft does with their operating systems" Not to worry. Microsoft is on top of the situation. Their IA64/Merced OS will be titled "Windows 2064" and will be ready for launch in, well, the year 2064 ! Paul

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (84618)	6/28/1999 11:26:00 PM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tench, One sided? Sure. I read and am pasting your post below for the readers to scroll down... not addressing point by point since you don't care to address my points and that is fine.. Funny you should mention "the hope is critical apps". Databases? Native Unix PA-RISC and UltraSparc III and Alpha tie down the Unixes as far as Merced is concerned, McKinley is a different story. CAD? Well even Unigraphics doesn't go away at first :-) and what we will definitely see from the Alpha side of the house is loaded $3500-$4000 EV68 boxes 8 months or so before Merced goes volume. If Merced does indeed ship at a $2000 price point, MDROnline's estimate of a $9000 Merced workstation is well within reason. You would pretty much be a little looney to buy a Merced to run an application (if avail. on Alpha) as the EV68 box will outperform the Merced and be considerably cheaper. Besides, EV68 has many months of momentum... the high-end 1.2 GHz should be a nice box compared to Merced and the value box at 933 MHz will do quite nice too! So while I agree with your assessment, I think there are considerable barriers to entry for Merced late 2000 timeframe. According to Craig Barrett at PCExpo he expects to see Merced in 12 to 18 months. Maybe he is sandbagging us on that 18 months.. but still late Y2K seems within reason for Merced boxes. > Any questions? Just one. What do you see as Merced's strongest segment and why? Rob ----- Tench wrote: Rob, the whole picture is much more complicated than the one-sided portrait that you paint for Alpha. In this post, I'll cover only the issue of software migration from IA-32 to IA-64. Hope you'll forgive me for dodging the other issues because discussing them could take up several more paragraphs. The big problem with the migration to IA-64 is inertia. Without the hardware IA-32 translation, moving from IA-32 to IA-64 is no easier than moving, say, from IA-32 to Alpha. And Alpha already has the lead in this case. But because Merced throws in IA-32 compatibility, the transition will be a lot easier because no one will have to throw away the existing software base that is out there. But why should IA-32 compatibility matter, if performance isn't going to be too hot? After all, if all you want to run is IA-32 programs, what's the point of buying Merced if we already have a well-established Xeon platform? Well, the hope is that the critical apps like database management, web servers, engineering CAD tools, and other CPU-crunching programs will be the first to make the transition to IA-64. They're the real programs that we all care about when it comes to Spec benchmark scores. The other apps that aren't performance-critical like e-mail servers, Samba, network card drivers, etc., won't need to be ported to IA-64 immediately. (Actually, I don't know about the drivers, but I'm sure you get the point.) Same thing goes with desktop applications like Microsoft Office, Netscape, and games. In other words, the bulk of the effort is concentrated on porting the real heavy-duty apps from IA-32 to IA-64. The rest can wait, particularly since IA-32 isn't going to die off any time soon. How well will this transition work? Hard to say, since supporting both IA-32 and IA-64 is dependent on the OS. We all know just how SUPERB a job Microsoft does with their operating systems. At least there'll be other OS's like Solaris, Linux, and SCO. And how well will IA-32 compatibility be accepted in the market? That's also hard to tell, but supposedly the Tier 1 guys like Dell, NEC, and even Compaq like the idea. Any questions?